Serf Wars Reviews

Serf Wars is a take on the empire building, real-time strategy game genre with a fairytale look and feel.

Serf Wars can be described as a game of empire building through mini-games. Players build and create a fantasy kingdom, train an army to attack others and play mini-games to fund this building and training. The look and feel of Serf Wars is reminiscent of fantasy fairytale lands, from the whimsical art style to the “magic beans” premium currency. The game mechanics are simple, with only gold and food as the two main resource requirements. Food is grown by building farms and is required to feed the population and the armies. Gold is gained through daily taxes collected from the population and through mini-games, which players can then spend on building and training. Other items required for particular buildings and army training activities are also earned through playing mini-games.

As a management sim, Serf Wars is very traditional and won't offer surprises to anyone who's spent a lot of time with these games on Facebook. It's the mini-games that really set Serf Wars apart. The mini-games are all action-based takes on very typical sorts of browser games. When you start the game, you can play a side-scrolling platformer and a bakery-themed variant of Snake. These games are extremely well-implemented, both in terms of graphics and controls. Serf Wars offers tons of achievements to pursue with them and you get in-game rewards for posting high scores. You gain more mini-games by adding certain buildings to your kingdom, some of which cost real money.

Like other Facebook RTS games such as Backyard Monsters and Kingdoms of Camelot, Serf Wars monetizes mainly through the sale of resources for building and reducing the time to build or upgrade structures. The game also monetizes by restricting the number of mini-games a player can use to earn gold by requiring tokens per play, which can only be gifted by friends or bought with magic beans. Certain mini-games are also unlocked through magic beans only.

Random events also occur while players are logged in the game, such as cats in trees which have to be rescued and fires that need to be put out. These events add a little flavor to the game and earn the player small sums of gold and/or experience. The battle element in Serf Wars is currently limited to attacking your friends by pitting your armies against theirs. World maps and the ability to ally with your friends to attack others are forthcoming, as is more content for the game.